There are various modes of welding, including manual welding, DC TIG welding and AC TIG welding, which have required corresponding types of power supply apparatuses.
Providing various types of power supply apparatuses for respective types of welding machines increases costs for welding and also may cause problems of how to keep the apparatuses ready to operate and how to transport them to the working sites. To solve the problems, a power supply apparatus has been proposed, which has various welding conditions set therein for various welding modes. Desired welding conditions can be selected so that it can be adaptively used with various welding modes.
An example of such power supply apparatus is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-136241 (JP 2003-136241 A). The power supply apparatus disclosed in this publication includes a control panel, on which a welding mode selecting push button switch, a current mode selecting push button switch, a pulse mode selecting push button switch, AC/DC switching push button switch, and a parameter setting unit are disposed. By selectively operating these switches, desired one of welding modes including manual welding, DC TIG welding (with high-frequency starting), AC TIG welding (with high-frequency starting), and TIG welding (with touch-starting), is selected, and various parameters required for the selected welding mode are set.
With this power supply apparatus, each time the apparatus is turned on, before starting welding, it is necessary to operate the switches and the parameter setting unit on the panel in order to select the desired welding mode and to set various parameters necessary to perform the selected welding, which is very troublesome.
An object of the present invention is to provide a power supply apparatus for a welding machine, with simplified welding mode selecting and parameter setting operations whereby preparation for the use of the power supply apparatus can be simplified.